Hillary Clinton’s Foundation and its donors have put her in a world of hurt. The news out today that Clinton failed to disclose foreign donors — conspicuously during her 2009-13 tenure as Secretary of State, for which the government has no oversight on her emails — has certainly compounded the issue, and led to a voluntary audit.
Clinton, of course, insists she has a clean past and that accusations concerning possible conflicts of interest are preposterous. With each new headline though, her dismissals are getting harder to believe.
These are the key points of the ongoing story:
1. Today on Fox News, The New York Times reporter Jo Becker revealed that the Clintons straight-up lied to her about whether Bill Clinton had attended a key meeting.
The Caller’s own Alex Griswold writes, “One of the revelations in the Times piece is that Bill Clinton played a key role in the insuring acquisition of key uranium mines from the Kazakh state-owned uranium mining company Kazatomprom to Canadian millionaire Frank Giustra. After the transaction, Giustra gave over $30 million to the Clinton Foundation.”
Later, they would tell Becker the meeting never happened.
2. In 2001, Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, founded the Clinton Foundation, which has grown into one of the world’s largest philanthropic endeavors. Hillary didn’t officially join the foundation until 2013, but both Bill and her daughter Chelsea Clinton have been closely involved for far longer.
3. While Clinton was Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation accepted tens millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments. At least one of these donations explicitly violated an ethics agreement the foundation had made with the Obama administration in order to avoid exposing Clinton to possible foreign influence.
4. The Foundation didn’t just take donations from governments, but also from at least one foreign company whose business interests intersected with U.S. strategic concerns.
5. In some instances, companies with close ties to the Clinton Foundation were also given contracts or favors from the U.S. government. General Electric, for instance, had the U.S. government lobby on its behalf for a contract with the Algerian government, and after landing that contract the company made a substantial donation to the Foundation. Similarly, the German pharmaceutical firm Bayer, for example, received a $4 million contract to spray insecticides in Ethiopia three months before it announced a major collaboration with the Clinton Health Access Initiative to cut the price of contraceptives in poor nations.
6. Despite these tens of millions of dollars in donations, the Clinton Foundation falsely claimed that it didn’t receive any money from foreign governments. Now, with evidence emerging to the contrary, the foundation is admitting that “errors” caused them to not report tens of millions in contributions, and is refiling its tax returns.
7. Since leaving the White House in 2001, the Clintons’ family income has exceeded $100 million. More than $26 million of that wealth was generated from speaking fees paid to Bill Clinton by companies that are also big donors to the Clinton Foundation, indicating close links between the charitable efforts of the Clintons and their own economic success.
8. While working at State, Clinton maintained a private email account for the vast majority of the business she conducted, which would make it relatively easy for her to mix personal and government business without falling under close scrutiny. This private email server contradicted White House policy and was apparently used to thwart Congressional and media investigations.
9. After leaving the cabinet, Clinton deleted all of her personal emails, making it impossible for any future investigation to read them and determine whether foreign donations could have potentially influenced Clinton’s decision-making. While Clinton says she had all her emails examined before deleting them and turned over copies of everything involving government business to the State Department, the determination of what emails to pass on and what to delete were made entirely by Clinton and her personal attorneys.
Thus far, Hillary’s newly-launched presidential campaign has condemned any suggestions that she could even conceivably have been exposed to undue foreign influence as “far-fetched conspiracy theories.” It seems time will tell, but if the trend is any indicator, Clinton’s troubles are far from over.
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